What happens when you become more excited about just one more cookie than any other pleasure?
The Fat Lady Sings
I remember an essay, “The Fat Lady Sings”, where the author connected her childhood hospitalization with over-eating. While bedridden, the food cart brought her daily excitement; she began to associate food with the best parts of her day. It’s easy to make those associations with food as salvation, distraction, deepest pleasure.
At an early age, I learned to associate food with safety and comfort, and the lack of food (particularly sugar) with shame and danger. But, it wasn’t until the last Atlantic crossing from South Africa to the Caribbean that I re-visited how deeply food can dominate my pleasure palette. The endless days of battling seasickness and boredom, swaying endlessly engulfed in thousands of miles of water, I’m not surprised at what happened. So many cruisers gain weight as they sail. Meal time became the main place I could exercise my creativity and enjoy some pleasure. Food became the main attraction, the main celebration.
But in-between meals, cookies, brownies, chocolates and soft drinks became little oasis of hope. Forty days later, I’ve formed some new food habits. But the ocean crossing is over and I no longer need three chocolate chip cookies to keep myself from discouragement. When my larger-than-me oldest son declines another helping and I’m still taking helpings, it makes me pause.
Why am I still eating?
I can sense the Spirit of God nudging me toward different pleasures than the cookies. Painting a satisfying scene is as visceral a pleasure as a chocolate chip cookie, so is writing or reading a well-crafted paragraph. I get a huge lift having a heart-to-heart conversation with Dale, my husband as I do for deep conversations with Finn, my oldest. When I listen to Ollie play his harp, I can feel my heart melting in a way that surpasses chocolate melting on my tongue.
But disciplining myself to not reach for the cookie recipe means I will need supernatural help. I’ve heard too many mothers berate their bodies, speak long and eloquently about calories and self-denial and guiltily share about cheating their diet. Diet can become encompassing and I don’t want that. So, if it’s going to last, if it’s going to be built from merciful kindness and not punitive self-talk, I will need God’s help. Moving from food-as-lifesaver to food-as-nourishment means I must say “no” and find those other pleasures waiting for me. It means I listen to the hunger to be sure it’s actually hunger for food.
Listening to our hungers means we must be hungry long enough to identify them. Living hungry is not something we do well, as Americans. It’s uncomfortable and scary. But it’s realistic and no harder than crossing an ocean in a sailboat which means I can, in fact, do it.
So where do I go for the strength to discipline myself, without harshness, inviting God’s waves of mercy?
Miss Lady Grey
About a week into our ocean crossing, I heard the Spirit of God prompt me to remember “Miss Lady Grey”, a painting of a scene symbolizing all I had survived in the my childhood. The passage in Proverbs, “Strength and dignity are her clothing and she smiles at the future” inspired the bearing of the central figure. A silhouette of a woman, curls frame her face and reach down to provide a handhold to help a young girl escape from a prison below. In the woman’s hair sits a finch bird, the same bird that forms our Lady Grey logo. I painted “Miss Lady Grey” to remind me of how the darkest pits became paths to my best joys.
Originally painted to show others what I can do for them, now, “Miss Lady Grey” was going to do its good work on me. I dug out the painting out of my boat portfolio and mounted it to the wall in our cabin. See her on the swaying walls reminded me of all I’ve overcome. The painting sparked my memory and gave me the discipline to not simply survive but thrive across the ocean. And now “Miss Lady Grey” has further work to do. If I could surmount the obstacles in my past, if I could sail across and ocean, then certainly I can ask the same God who strengthened me to who me healthy ways with food, to find how to recalibrate my snacking without harshness, enjoying God’s waves of mercy through the growth.
These are the kinds of paintings we all need in our life. “Miss Lady Grey” has deeper stories behind it and I will be sharing more about those stories, along with more insights from my ocean crossing in an upcoming event.
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